


Penitent

by Hth



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Gen, Grief
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-14
Updated: 2009-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 10:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At night she wept in her sleep as well, and sometimes woke up with her hands bitten and bloody, as if she had tried to take revenge on them. How comforting it would be, to blame only her hands, or the fingers that pulled the trigger.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Penitent

"It wasn’t your fault," Rodney told her, but he helped her fold her largest blanket, the purple Actassi velvet. When he didn’t have anything left to do with his hands, he stood helplessly in the middle of her room. Teyla had never seen Rodney’s hands so empty before, so still. "He would never blame you. He...wouldn’t."

"No," Teyla said, but she did not know anymore.

She knew him so well, once. She thought she knew so much. Now she knew the sound of his voice as he begged for his life, and that superceded all other knowledge.

"Don’t go," Rodney said, stiff and stubborn and timid at once. "Not so– not yet. Think it over. At least wait until Ronon– "

"No," she said. Cowardly. "You will have to make my goodbyes for me."

"Why do I have to?" Rodney said, his voice gone high-pitched and threadbare with strain. "Why should I have to, it’s too much, what am I supposed to tell him? It’s not fair. It’s too hard. You owe him.... No," he said awkwardly, too late. Teyla sat down on the foot of her bed and held a shoe between her hands, a white running shoe from Earth that she had not worn even often enough to scuff its startling, sharp colorlessness. "No, I didn’t mean..... It wasn’t your fault."

"It is not fair," she said, watching the way its laces dangled in the air like dead things. "If I could offer you justice, I would."

"It’s not your fault."

"Stop saying that," she snapped.

"I can’t stop saying that!" His hands sprang to life at last, waving frantically somewhere at the level of his head. "He’s not here to say it, so someone has to say it for him!"

Not here to say it – as if he were simply...absent, perhaps missing. "You have no power to forgive me in his place."

__

_Don’t listen. You don’t have to. Sheppard doesn’t think you’ll do it._

Rodney put his thumb on her chin gingerly and tilted her face up toward him. "Don’t go," he said. "I think if I lose one more friend, I – I’ll – "

She gripped his wrist and let his fingers wrap at a strange, backwards angle around her hand. She did not know how to tell him that he had lost her already, at the moment she pulled the trigger. Her own belongings were a stranger’s, and she knew that she would leave most of these packed boxes behind, to serve as mementos to Teyla Emmagen’s mourners. Most of these things meant nothing to her now, and those few that did meant too much to bring into this exile, to lose their power to comfort and to become tainted.

*

She was alone on the cliff for three days, long enough to secure her pavilion and canopy, long enough to become accustomed to using the rope to lower herself down to the river in the sleepy, muddled early mornings, her bare feet finding the intermittent outcroppings of stone with more ease even in that short time.

From the riverbed, she could not see her dwelling; it was set too far back from the edge, and the pale gray stones amplified the light on every side, leaving her squinting to see the details of anything anyhow. She thought of the specially made spectacles that John used to protect his eyes and wondered what became of them – of all John’s things. Nothing, more than likely. They were probably in his room, where he had left them. It had only been five days, although it seemed like longer.

She bathed in the river and washed her clothes there, pulled up her nets full of fat pink fish. On this planet, uninhabited for so many millennia, the game was fearless and easy to trap. She could shoot waterbirds while they floated on the surface, too, but she only did it one time, then wept bitterly over their soft, green and white feathers and their shattered heads and could not stop weeping for hours.

She had not brought limitless ammunition with her, anyway. She ought to confine herself to foraging and trapping, saving her bullets for emergency use.

At night she wept in her sleep as well, and sometimes woke up with her hands bitten and bloody, as if she had tried to take revenge on them. How comforting it would be, to blame only her hands, or the fingers that pulled the trigger.

Mateyna arrived at her camp after three days, leaning on a large walking stick and carrying bulky packs on her back that contained such staples as Teyla did not keep in Atlantis – flour and salt, an axe, some pots and a griddle. It was a long walk from the settlement, and Teyla could not very well turn her away to return in the night, so she offered a seat at her fire and a blanket in her pavilion.

"You mean to eat your own cooking, then?" Matenya said, smiling with a little fear behind it. She probably thought Teyla was going mad, feared that she was no longer safe to play with as the two of them had played together since childhood.

Teyla smiled back as best she could and said, "I deserve my own cooking."

But that made Mateyna frown instead. She reached out and put her hand on Teyla’s knee, her round, happy face so serious now. "You are the only one who thinks so. Even Dr. Weir was not accused or imprisoned."

"Of course not," Teyla said, startled. "Why should she be? She was powerless to prevent...." Teyla looked down at her hands, their small bruises and cracked nails and the sandy dirt pressed into the grooves of her palm. "I was myself. My actions were no one else’s."

"I understand that you saved many lives," Mateyna said, a mother’s soft, indulgent tones. Mateyna was a mother to three now, two of them living. As a younger woman, Teyla had begrudged her that, silently and privately bitter and guilt-ridden over her own inability to conceive. Now she blessed the Ancestors for it.

She had asked John once if he had children, and his face took on that strange, startled look he sometimes got when a personal matter ambushed him. _ No, no, no,_ he said. _Oh, God, I’d be the worst dad. Man._ She did not believe that, but she saw that he genuinely did.

"I did save many lives," Teyla said. The words sounded hollow, memorized.

Mateyna had been in Atlantis the day before. Teyla did not ask her for news; news from Atlantis would be slow in coming from now on, would one day perhaps stop altogether, and she did not want to be any more dependent on it than she was. But Mateyna told her what she knew without being solicited: Elizabeth’s resignation. Visits from Earth-based administrators, to what purpose Mateyna could not know. The funeral, and a burial at sea.

"At sea," Teyla repeated. "I would have thought...the sky." Somehow, it did not surprise her that his body had not been returned to his own world.

Mateyna shared her bedding, but did not curl close and whisper secrets in Teyla’s ear as they did when they were girls. In the morning she pressed her forehead to Teyla’s and said, "Come home to us when you are able. You are as well loved as you ever were before."

"Thank you," Teyla said.

When she went down to the river, she took her clothes off and walked in, the clean-polished round stones cool and painless under her feet, and then she dove deep and floated back to the surface over and over. By afternoon, she was simply floating, the gentle current too weak to bear her far downstream, let alone all the way out to the sea.

*

Every month – most months – someone came from the settlement to visit Teyla. They brought flour and cloth and treats from feast tables, but they spoke to her very little, and Teyla spoke back to them even less. Only a familiar face, sympathetic but resigned, and a warm touch that meant goodbye.

When she had company, she never had nightmares. At first it was a relief. Later, the nightmares were preferable to the company, strangely comforting in their familiarity.

His face was growing indistinct in her conscious thoughts, memory sliding through her fingers. Only in dreams could she see him clearly, and in most of her dreams, he was about to die.

She had been on the cliffs for seven months before she saw the black and gray of a Lantean uniform. She recognized the pocketed vest, the gun sheathed at the leg, the durable boots, but she did not recognize the man. It had been a hot day, and even in the evening there was a fine sheen of heat distortion around everything; she had spent the whole day swimming in the river, and she looked up from laying kindling to stoke the embers of her fire and pushed her wet, tangled hair out of her eyes.

He stopped some yards away from her, on the other side of her pavilion, and he bent over slightly, one hand braced on his thigh and the other fumbling for a canteen of water. His face was pink and sweaty above a sandy-brown beard, his eyes blue, and Teyla was confused for a moment, knowing him and not knowing him, unable to fit this man to this place. "Christ," he said, "I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I went through four canteens and I know I’m still dehydrated, I must have fallen down four times in the last hour, and I’m not _that_ clumsy, so I’m sure it must be low blood-sugar and– "

"Rodney," she said, the first word she had spoken aloud in two months or more. It came out too softly, but it silenced him anyhow.

She stood up, and then found herself embracing him fiercely, sliding her arms between the warm back of his neck and the inconvenient bulk of his backpack. He put his arms around her waist and his head down against her neck.

They went inside the cooling shade of the pavilion, and she fixed the last of that morning’s grain mash, along with a double handful of fresh berries while he stripped out of his pack and vest and boots and weapons. He ate the mash and then gave her a carefully wrapped cold breakfast sandwich, eggs and Canadian bacon on a muffin, such as she had often chosen from the mess hall on Atlantis. She cut it in half and shared it with him.

Words had never come naturally to Teyla, never without great deliberation and necessity. It was easier simply to be with him, to listen to him say quick, careless things about the weather and her new home and the Athosians he’d had to get to know now that affairs between her people and the Lanteans were conducted through people other than Teyla. She put her head down on his broad chest, and he tried to card his fingers through her hair, but they got stuck over and over in all the snarls.

"I worry about you all the time," he said. "You’re out here all alone, anything could happen."

"I am fine," she said. "As my people must have told you."

"Excuse me for wanting to see for myself. I thought you might be, you know, going slowly insane up here, or even more insane than you were to start with, because you know something? This is fucking insane, it’s – _insane_. You don’t have to do this, Teyla. If you can’t – be in Atlantis anymore, I understand that, but what about your, your people, what about – _everything_? Reality? The rest of your life, does this ring any bells for you?"

She did not answer him right away, and when she did, it was not her own words coming to her rescue, but a wiser, better man’s. "My father used to say that your life was the choices you made," she said slowly, her tongue stiff around the words. "Is that what I have to go back to? Choice after choice – and more – choices like that one? I cannot, Rodney. I cannot choose anymore, this life over that one, the risks, the fighting, the regret. I do not want the rest of my life. Not at such cost."

"I miss him, too," Rodney said. His eyes were closed, and rimmed with small lines that had not been present when Teyla last saw him. She touched them gently, and then his cheek, still faintly slippery with his protective lotion, and the new growth of beard.

She kissed his mouth lightly, uncomfortably aware that she must smell like sweat and fish guts and river weeds. But in spite of it, Rodney made a soft noise and opened his mouth to her, cupping his large hands around the back of her neck and her matted hair.

Long ago, when she had entertained idle fantasies of Rodney, she had imagined straddling him, leaning down against his solid body, his hands settling on her hips, but now she tugged on his shoulder until he rolled over on her, and it was better still to be weighed down, to meet Rodney’s chest with every breath she took. He put a hand on her thigh through one of the slits in her skirt and kissed messily up the side of her neck. She curled her left hand around the back of his head, but she could not bear to touch him with her right hand, which was silvered with dozens of faded scars and throbbing with the memory of closing around the trigger.

She was wearing only the skirt and a leather elvedna, the garment that Lanteans sometimes wore as protective gear and called a poncho – none of it much of a barrier to Rodney’s hands, nor to pulling her knees up and apart. He stroked her with his thumb until her vision went strangely dark and she felt exactly as she wanted to feel – powerless, empty, like a wild thing bound only by instinct and not a human being whose choices could break the world apart. She was whimpering and keening against his ear, her hand knotted in the back of his shirt and her hips begging more eloquently than her voice could for more of his fingers, and deeper.

He had to pull away from her a little to unfasten his pants, and it seemed to break a kind of spell. He hovered there on his knees, looking shocked with himself, looking ashamed through his hunger. Teyla wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand, blinked it out of her eyes, and said, "Have you – not lain with someone else since John?"

"Oh, God," he said with a familiar roll of his eyes that surprised a smile from her. "Not you, too. We weren’t – it wasn’t like that. He was senior staff, he was Air Force. There were roughly a million different versions of Don’t Ask, Don’t Touch John."

"He was not always scrupulous about rules."

Rodney snorted. "No, well, maybe not. So maybe that was just his version of the brush-off, I don’t know. But we...didn’t, ever. Jesus, we _should_ have. I’d have put up a bigger fight if I’d realized the whole city thought we were anyway."

"I’m sorry," she said. Another life she had stolen with a single bullet – the life they might have found their way toward together.

"Stop," he said softly, leaning down to kiss her cheek, then her lips. "The person who killed him is dead."

"Yes," she said. The truth of that statement was not dependent on whether he meant Phebus or Teyla Emmagen.

His hands cupped the outside of her breasts, beneath the elvedna, as he slid inside her. Her skirt bunched between her tailbone and the ground, a vague and distant annoyance. She wrapped her legs around his waist and put her hands over her head, her fingers dragging off the edge of her blankets, through the old dirt she had tracked into the pavilion since its last good cleaning. Rodney pushed the elvedna up to her shoulders and reached up, his palms pressing flat against hers, his fingers trembling where he hooked them around her fingers, and lowered his head to lick between her breasts and kiss the top of them. His beard was not as rough against her skin as she had expected.

"Please," Teyla said, and Rodney made a rough, moaning noise on her skin in response and pushed in harder. As her consciousness took on the contours of the intense and irregular rhythm he established, she continued to say it, a habit, a noise with no meaning – _please, please, please, please_.

When his body went slack against hers, his grip on her hands loosened as well. After a few moments of deep, ragged breaths and a few kisses behind her ear, he moved one hand away completely, setting it on the ground to push himself up. "Teyla," he said, and his eyes were glassy and fearful. "I’m so – I’m sorry, I didn’t– "

She put her fingers against his lips and closed her eyes. Soon enough, it would all seep out of her – the slow river-currents of pleasure, the freedom, the absence of loneliness. She wanted it now, for as long as it would last, much more than she wanted whatever apologies he thought he owed her.

Teyla slept on her front and so did Rodney; he found a way to comfortably overlap her body, his feet off the edge of her blanket, his head resting at the base of her neck after he had removed the elvedna, his arm wrapped around her ribs and his hand between her breasts. "I have wanted to ask you," Teyla murmured into her pillow. "Why release his body to the sea, and not the sky?"

"_Why?_" Rodney said, startling her eyes open with the low thrum of his unexpected anger. "Oh, I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t my idea. I had a detonation all worked out – a big ball of fire in the sky, he would have loved it."

"What happened?"

"Ronon fucking Dex happened," Rodney said bitterly. "Apparently that meets some kind of Satedan criterion for desecrating a dead body, and _apparently_ he can be immobile on a morphine drip and still terrify the entire city. Then some idiot dug into John’s personnel file and found out he was baptized Catholic – as if he had a single religious belief, as if he could have _cared less_ – and yet suddenly everyone had their excuse to knuckle under and ban the cremation. So now he’s peacefully being eaten by fish, fish who I’m sure respect him deeply, as does God. Or something like that. Who fucking knows."

"How is Ronon?"

Rodney turned his face into her neck and grumbled, "Ruining my life. Teyla – God, you have no idea. It’s like I’m suddenly the parent of a teenager – a giant, angry, traumatized teenager who hates me."

"He does not hate you."

"You don’t know," Rodney sighed. "He hates everything now. He’s – he’s not all right, not at all. And I don’t know how to do anything about it, and he wants fuck-all to do with me, but I can’t just – leave him alone, because John would.... It’s not like John cared about all that many things. I thought it would be easy to just – keep an eye on those things. But – well, Atlantis, Atlantis is all right, it’s pretty much none the worse for wear. So there’s Atlantis, and then there’s you, I have essentially no influence with you, and there’s Ronon; I’m crap with Ronon, I can’t say or do anything right as far as he’s concerned, and I can’t quit. Elizabeth is gone, you’re gone. There’s nobody – there’s nobody who really loved him left, except the two of us. I can’t quit. So I just knock my head against the Great Wall of Ronon, over and over, and the closest I’ve come to helping him is to give him a convenient target, and every stupid fight he drags me into – all right, I’m not as hard to provoke as I probably should be, but he does start them – every time, no matter what we’re actually arguing about, somehow it magically becomes about which one of us was closer to John, who knew him better, which of us he loved more. It’s like reliving the fucking funeral argument, infinitely. And he’s too stubborn to let me win and I’m too petty to let him win, and I think I’m probably looking at the rest of my life here, locked in mutual vindictive misery with this person who’s supposedly my friend. Which is really something to look forward to, don’t you think?"

Teyla did not know what to say, but soon enough Rodney was snoring lightly against her neck, and it did not matter.

In the morning he held her face between his hands and kissed her forehead, then pressed his own to it. "You could come home, you know," he said timidly, almost a question. "We– I’d be frankly overjoyed to have you there. I feel like the only adult in the whole universe, and you were really always much better at that than I was."

If there words that Rodney would understand, Teyla did not know them, but she felt compelled to give him the truth, as impenetrable as it was. "I am his murderer," she said simply. "I have no right to his home, to his – people. His friends."

Rodney frowned, frustrated misery bottled up in too few words. "That’s not – that’s so fucking stupid, you’re not – _I’m_ your friend. I’m _your_ friend, too."

She could only shake her head, not because it was not true, but because it did not matter. She had fired the weapon. She had weighed his life in her hand, priced him as though he were goods at market, and sold him more cheaply than two hundred other men and women. A wise choice, perhaps, a fair one, but false. Every day and every night since, waking and sleeping, her heart rebelled inside her, telling her the ugly truth: she had undersold him badly, struck a bargain that could never reflect his true value. Not to her. Not to anyone who had loved him.

*

In the middle of a sudden thaw, a false, too-early springtime, Mateyna came to the cliffs with the news of Halling’s death.

"Dead?" Teyla’s voice was weary and weak from a short, hard winter’s disuse. "Killed?"

Mateyna shook her head. Her voice was muffled through a thick scarf wrapped around her face – fat green fibers, not fereti or lugadu wool, likely of Lantean make. "He spent the winter ill," she said, and it was a strange twist in Teyla’s stomach. She had not known. "You will come to his Ring Ceremony, won’t you?" she asked, pleading and yet defiant, too. As if Teyla had already refused.

"Yes," Teyla said.

The settlement was larger than when Teyla had seen it last, the fields reaching further outside the bounds of the homesteads. She followed along behind Mateyna and her walking stick, terribly conscious of the way people stopped in their tracks to stare at her, the way children moved away – too young to remember her, some of them, others just too young to understand such changes.

Mateyna’s pavilion had a mirror inside, but Teyla had been aware even before seeing her reflection how she looked – ragged and thin, pieced clothing and haphazard furs thrown around her shoulders and waist, some strange hag with a too-young face. Mateyna’s younger son had made a surreptitious warding sign against her when she entered his home.

The damage was done, perhaps, but Teyla still took some pains to make herself ready for the Ring Ceremony. Mateyna brought her hot water and helped her scrub and file her dirty, broken fingernails, helped her wash her hair and comb it into some semblance of order. She loaned her second-best gown, too large for Teyla, but at least a civilized garment, and in the evening chill it was not inappropriate for her to wrap one of her silver furs around her shoulders (a nameless beast, native to this world; perhaps no one living had seen one, except for Teyla, who had trapped it in a pit and shot it). That masked the way the bodice slumped gracelessly, cut large enough for Mateyna’s sturdy shoulders and generous breasts.

She was fit to be spoken to at the ceremony, although people still approached her with instinctive whispers – not fearful now, not entirely. Strangely reverent, as if Teyla had learned some eldritch thing in the wilderness that intrigued them but held them at bay as well.

_I know nothing,_ she wanted to tell them. _I have found nothing there, no courage, no mercy, no hope. You must not follow in the way that I have gone._

Once the ceremony began, eyes and minds were drawn away from Teyla, each person isolated in his or her own grief; no life in this small world could fail to be touched by a man like Halling, who had never aimed to be their leader, who had been so regardless. She began to matter again only when Meyhas turned toward her and said, "Teyla Emmagen, the right to sing him home is yours. Will you?"

All of them looked at her – every one of the survivors of Athos, and a few Lanteans as well, faces she recalled only dimly. Teyla felt frozen in place, stone and wood, hearing the words in her head, and yet at a terrible distance. She shook her head, but they continued to stare at her. Teyla wet her lips and said, "No. I am not...."

_Capable of it. Who I once was. Teyla Emmagen._ Slowly, one by one, they seemed to come to believe her, and turned away.

Irona sang him home instead – a cousin of Halling’s, the daughter of his father’s brother. She did it passably well.

She woke in the night from the old nightmare – John’s face, John’s voice (_you don’t have to – he cares for you_), John’s death – and she left Mateyna’s pavilion, going barefoot into the wet, cold grass, into the night that was still half-lit by Halling’s pyre. She could not approach it directly; the fire was tended to its ashes by family and dearest friends, and Teyla had not been either in long years. Still, it filled her vision, and she sank into the mud on her knees, breathless, aching, wracked with guilt and loss for this, too – that he had died, her parents’ dearest friend, her steady counselor and sometimes opponent, without her comfort or witness.

She suddenly understood Ronon’s anger and dread of this. How could such a man, once so very alive, become nothing but the smoke and ash that the wind carried toward Teyla, shedding pieces of a life like snowflakes onto her hair? The dignity of the Ring Ceremony was no comfort, the words of the ancient song were meaningless. _Fear and shame now in the past, pain and sorrow gone at last_– For whom? For Halling, for John? They were real enough for Teyla.

Was she not the one who needed to be sung home? But there was no song for that, no circle, no sunrise, no peace, no ground except the stark earth under her feet, cut in half by a river that poured slowly, endlessly, toward John’s deep grave. She wanted to go home, she wanted desperately, half in a panic, to go _home_, to Athos, to Atlantis, to anywhere but where she had been this year and more, and yet the more she grasped toward it, the more she heard only silence, nothing to lead her forward.

She tried to sing herself, as she should have done for Halling, but her voice broke on almost every syllable and she managed only a tuneless, scraping keen that slowly gathered strength, until it came from everywhere inside her – not a song, but a scream, an angry, miserable wail that, once it began, felt like it would never stop. She could feel tears on her face. She wrapped her arms around her stomach and leaned over, screaming, singing – no words in any human language, only a dark, savage anger at the injustice of his death, the sheer meaningless cruelty of it, and her shame and grief. Her hands. Her choice. Her _choice_.

Death was common enough in Teyla’s world. She had even chosen to kill before. She should have been prepared, should know how to manage it, to bear up and move on, but she did not. She could have endured the loss of him, but only if it were inevitable, if it had been his fate. What she could not endure was knowing how easily it could all have changed – a heartbeat’s hesitation, a different road.

She left the next morning, before most of the settlement had risen.

*

By Teyla’s uneven count of days, Ronon came very nearly two years to the day after John’s death. She did not imagine that to be coincidence.

He was as much changed as Rodney had been, if not more so, but she had no trouble recognizing him. He had cut his hair much shorter and arranged it in narrow braids, much more numerous than his thick twists of hair had been; without the bulk of his hair to draw the eye away, his face looked sharper and thinner, more striking than ever.

She stood to meet him, stood her ground even when she saw his eyes and understood that he was here for reasons quite different from Rodney’s reasons. She clenched her fingers and shifted her weight for balance, and she kept her eyes on his face and not his hands.

His fist caught her on the outer edge of her cheekbone, pain flaring up behind her eye. She stumbled back a step and veered a little to the side, but she caught herself with her forearm against the trunk of a tree and did not fall. When she straightened up and looked at him again he did not look angry anymore – only puzzled and perhaps a bit annoyed. "I figured you’d fight back," he said.

"No," she said.

"I didn’t come here to forgive you," he said.

"Clearly," she said dryly, testing the sore place on her cheek with her fingertips.

"If I had been with him instead of you, he’d still be alive."

"I know," she said. She had thought of it often – every day. How differently things might have gone, had it been Ronon guarding Thelan at the end instead of her. Ronon was very far from a cruel man, but however hard she tried, she could not imagine him allowing himself to be blackmailed into executing John.

"He would still be _alive_," Ronon said again, as if perhaps she had not heard him, or did not understand what such a thing would mean to Ronon.

"But he would despise you," she said quietly. He was not a bad man, not at all; he deserved her gentleness. He deserved much that he would never have. "In his heart, he would blame you for all those innocent lives lost. What you wanted from him, you could never have had."

Ronon sat down on a stone, as if suddenly drained of all his energy. "Well, I don’t have it now, either, do I?" he grumbled.

She smiled a little and crouched down in the dirt in front of him. She wanted to put a hand on his knee, but did not quite dare. "You had his friendship and his respect. Would you be happier now, knowing you had thrown those things away?"

His head came up, a quick resurgence of stubbornness. "Happier than with him dead? Maybe."

"I have not asked for your forgiveness," she said, her voice sharpening. "But do not make it a simpler thing than it was. It was a terrible crime, but it was not a mistake."

"Why can’t we just – get over this?" he asked, and for the first time he looked like her Ronon, the brash, sardonic, brutally honest man she had once known. "Why is everybody getting better except us?" Teyla had no answer for that, and offered none. "Do you still miss him?" Ronon asked, giving her a keen look, "or are you just sitting around punishing yourself?"

It was not an unfair question. She found it harder and harder to recall the details of his face, the cadences of his speech. She had been John Sheppard’s killer for two years, longer than, in life, she had been his friend. "I do miss him," she said at last. "Before I met him, I knew life to be difficult and painful. The time I spent with him.... He saw the world in a different light. He was a quiet man in many ways, but his joys were so pure and so strong. Flying, the Hail Mary...those silly slow wheels of his. He was as easy to love as a child, watching him watch the world. Without him, everything has gone dark again."

It was more than she had said, all together, since she could remember. Ronon’s hands rested in fists on his thighs and he said nothing, even when she moved away to make him dinner.

They ate together in silence, and by the end she was leaning against his leg, looking up at the stars, and he was at least allowing it. It was not a reconciliation, not truly, but she was meekly grateful for any human contact she could have, and she sensed that perhaps he was no less hungry to be touched.

"You owe me nothing," she said at last, well after midnight. "But if you would...tell me of Atlantis.... I would be grateful."

She thought he would ignore her, but then he said, "We had all this turnover, for a long time. Four different interim governors, officers coming in and going out. Everything was crazy. Now it’s not bad. Colonel Carter is better than any of the others; the military and the scientists both think she’s one of theirs, so everybody’s happy."

The name seemed familiar, but it took Teyla a moment to place it. "Ah," she said when she did. "Colonel Carter – Rodney’s beloved."

Ronon snorted. "Not so much anymore," he said bitterly. "I guess he’s moved on to some new stupid thing that’s never going to happen for him. Fucking McKay."

"You should be gentler with Rodney," Teyla said. "Your friendship would mean much to him."

"If he wasn’t my friend, I’d have killed him by now," Ronon said. It was the sort of thing Teyla would once have taken for a joke; she was less certain of it now. "It’s just – he drives me crazy. He’s always around, breathing down my neck. Half the time I don’t know if he’s trying to be my shrink or if he’s trying to be Sheppard, but either way, he’s not even close."

She did not know exactly when he moved from his rock to the ground beside her, or how long he sat there at her shoulder before he laid down with his head in her lap. She ran his thin braids through her callused fingertips, and in the first blue light before dawn, with only a few stars visible above the canopy of trees, he said, "Everyone says to go on with my life, but I think I’m going backwards, somehow. I feel like I did ten years ago – when Malena died." Teyla did not recognize the name, but she had long suspected that Ronon’s restraint with the many women and men who had offered themselves to him with varying degrees of subtlety had something to do with an old love he still grieved. "I didn’t _want_ to feel better, I didn’t want to be happy again – not that it was really an option, but I was glad it wasn’t. I didn’t want to know that I could be happy without her. And now it’s – the same thing, all over again. Everyone else has gotten back to normal, and all I want to do is miss him forever. It’s like...anything else just makes him feel so far away."

_I cannot always recall what he looked like_, Teyla wanted to say, but for some reason she did not.

She thought Ronon was asleep when he spoke again, startling her slightly. "But you know...not everyone has...anyone who gives a fuck what happens to them. I haven’t always had that. And I do, now, and sometimes I think.... I don’t even think I really want any– anyone to give a fuck about me, but maybe it’s – not right? Not...right, somehow. To just act like it doesn’t even matter."

When he left the next morning, he brushed a thumb gently over the bruise on her cheek, and he looked sorry for it but did not apologize. "Do you think," he said, "that there’s just a certain number of dead people you can have in your past, before it all falls apart? Like – somebody dies, and it hurts, but you keep going, and then ten people die, and fifty people – and suddenly you get to, I don’t know, a hundred or whatever. And then that one is – your hundredth death, that’s the one you can’t come back from. Like maybe it’s not that we’re so much more screwed up than everyone else, it’s just that...they’re all still counting to a hundred, and we’re already there."

"Maybe," she said, although the theory was more fatalistic than Teyla tended toward.

John might have been their hundredth death, or their first, or their ten thousandth. It wasn’t his death that had broken them, but the words they were waiting for him to say – would wait forever, now, and never hear him say: Ronon’s _I love you_, Teyla’s _I forgive you_.

"I may not see you again," Ronon said. "I may not be staying much longer."

"I am sorry to hear it," Teyla said, surprised to realize that she was. Even as far from Atlantis as she now felt, it meant something to her to know that it was still there, and still mostly as she remembered it. With Ronon gone, she would be connected to it by fewer threads than ever, and that hurt more than she would have guessed.

"Well," he said, a little awkwardly. "It’s complicated. I haven’t exactly...decided yet. Not for sure."

*

After Ronon, she mostly gave up marking the time. She was caught in a small rockslide while descending the cliff to the river and broke her right wrist, and the time passed at a different pace for a while as she did the best she could to tend it and worked hard to relearn many skills using her left hand, or her elbow. Her wrist healed, for all intents and purposes, but remained weak and prone to soreness, particularly when it rained. She had to relocate her small homestead temporarily to the riverbed while she was unable to climb, and after a while it began to feel more natural to be wet than dry.

She gave names to all the amphibians and waterbirds and insects native to this planet that she did not recognize from elsewhere. She began to sing again; her voice was rusted and uneven, but it was only for her own amusement, improvised melodies and fragments of songs from her childhood. She swam at night and sheltered under shadowed rock outcrops during the day, contemplating the ways of lizards. She passed days, sometimes, without once thinking of John Sheppard, or Atlantis, or Teyla Emmagen.

She spent a year in this way, or two years, or six months. She did not know.

And then the Wraith came. Two hive ships and their attending storm of darts, growling across the sky. Teyla crouched on the slick stones where the water lapped, woken from her nap, naked and dazed, and watched them pass overhead. They seemed to move slowly, inexorably, although she knew that was a trick of perspective. They were moving quickly, very quickly, and they were moving northeast, toward Atlantis.

Teyla dove underwater and remained submerged while they passed, but even when she could not see or hear them, her heartbeat would not slow down. Atlantis – Atlantis. Two hive ships; not for the first time, but still, it was nothing to take lightly. She wondered how many ZPMs were in Atlantis now, and if the city would trust to the strength of its shields, or if they would drop their defenses to fire back. She wondered who would make the decision.

As if in a dream, Teyla climbed back up the cliff face and began to pack a few provisions – dried fruit, dried meat, hard roots that would taste sweet and strong when she roasted them under ashes. She put on a skirt and an Athosian vest, and over it her faded gray jacket with the Atlantis patch on the arm. Only a few stitches had ripped loose over the years. She slid her fingers across the pattern of the threads, the nose of the equine creature who gave her galaxy its name in their language.

By the time she set out, her rational mind knew that the battle was likely over, and Atlantis quite possibly no longer existed – but then, she had not been primarily a rational creature for some time.

A direct line toward the Bay of Atlantis, following in the wake of the hive ships, was a hard walk, mostly downhill. Instead Teyla chose to follow the river. She had never walked all the way to the sea, but she knew the land well enough to recall that it would lead her fifty miles or more south along the coast from the shellfish-rich bay where visiting Puddlejumpers often landed and warriors and travelers from the Milky Way would hold impromptu, pseudo-secret festivals with the young men and women of Athos. Teyla had brought John Sheppard, once, to such a gathering, and danced with him in the firelight while he muttered self-consciously and threatened to pay her back direly for it. She remembered his face well, the fall of each distinct shadow, and the dimensions of his hands when he cupped her face between them and said, _You’re killing me, Teyla. I’m trying to be the good guy, here._

They had broken no rules that night, except perhaps the appearance of impropriety. Her chest ached at the thought of him, and for once it was not his death that brought it on, but his life. Her dear John, ever the good guy, loved so ferociously by so many people to whom he could never grant his permission. _ He cares for you more than you know_, Thelan had told her, but he was wrong. She had always been aware of John’s depths, and his borders as well.

She walked for a day and a half, mostly lost in a trance of memory – John’s temper, John’s surprising bouts of shyness. His sense of humor, alternately desert-dry and gleefully juvenile. His love of speed, and his equivalent and balancing love of taking life slowly, of long, aimless days and nights, the quest to discover the meaning of life in the spin of a ball thrown in a game with no stakes whatsoever. John’s violent nightmares, his untrusting streak, the clumsy but intermittently deadly way he flirted, his sense of honor, made up of a number of frightening blind alleys and sharp turns. The way he only grudgingly admitted to experiencing pain, the way he made it sound like a joke when it had to be done at all. His need to obtain consensus from those he respected, even if he had to wring it from them through guilt. His desire to be a good guy, his ever-present fear that he was not. His infuriating smirk, his adorable ugly laugh, the soft, half-frightened smile in his eyes when he caught a look from one of his inner circle that gave away the joy they took in him.

It seemed fitting to end the journey on a beach. The sand was pale and bright, and the water reflected light even more aggressively, a long, blinding view that bent from shore to sea up to the sky. She built a fire on the far edge of the beach, where the scrub grass and shrubs dissolved into sand, and turned her face north towards Atlantis, watching the colors of the sky change with the coming of night. She did not know if she was watching for some sign of life from Atlantis, or mourning it.

She did know that she had killed John to save Atlantis, and that made Atlantis, by something like the transitive property of mathematics, almost unbearably precious. Her heart seemed to change shape inside of her, pressing outward painfully like a bloody flower in bloom; she had not wanted anything real in so long, had not cared about her own future or anyone else’s. Now she did. Atlantis was hers; she had saved it with her own hands, her own free will, paid for it with everything she had and such grief as she had not known she contained. Atlantis was _hers_. She sat up most of the night, shedding quiet, mostly painless tears, amazed to recognize these things inside of her for what they were: hope and desire and pride.

She did not know what she was waiting for until she awoke mid-morning and saw that it had arrived – a Puddlejumper, sliding down out of the sky, landing further up the beach with an awkward, fishtailing skitter to the left. Teyla stood up and began to walk toward it.

Rodney came around the nose from the passenger side, and she was startled to see the pilot’s door swing out and open and Ronon step out. He smiled at the surprise that certainly showed on her face and slapped the side of the Jumper. "We’re testing the patch that lets you fly one without the gene," he said. "It’s _awesome_."

"I saw the hive ships," she said, walking up to Rodney’s side, under his arm, as though it were the most natural thing to do in the world. "I was concerned for you all."

Rodney kissed the top of her head and said, "Sorry about that. There was really nothing to worry about; we kicked their asses into the next century."

Ronon rolled his eyes. "_There was really nothing to worry about_," he repeated, aggrieved. "Can I get that on a sound file or something? Can I play it for you the next ten million times we have to scrape you off the ceiling before you’ll shut up and concentrate on the ass-kicking part?"

Rodney rolled his eyes, an expression so like Ronon’s that Teyla almost choked on a laugh. "I save the universe, and he questions my methodology. So, uh. Technically speaking, we’re out here testing the Driver’s Ed patch. But we came this way looking for any, uh, stray life-signs that could be, well, you. Not that there was any reason to believe the Wraith had anything on the agenda here other than destroying us, but we thought – well, we’re checking up on you, okay? There, I said it. We were concerned, too."

Teyla put her arms around Rodney and hugged him hard. She did not know what she had ever done to deserve such loyalty, these friendships that could survive so much lost time, so much regret. "Take me home," she said. She realized too late that it was presumptuous to assume there was a home for her on Atlantis still, just because she wanted one so intensely, but then she chose not to care. She would be presumptuous, she would humble herself, she would do whatever she must.

"God, yes," Rodney said fervently. "And it’s about time, too. You have to be the most obstinate person I’ve ever met, and you know the sort of people I’ve met."

Ronon put his arm around her neck and pressed his forehead to hers so hard it almost hurt. "I’m sorry," he said roughly. "I was mad at you for a long, long time for no reason. It wasn’t your fault."

"Yes, it was," she said. "It was my fault, and I am not sorry for it. I would choose it again. It was the right thing to do."

"Goddammit," Ronon said softly. "Yeah, it was. I’m – I’m glad I wasn’t in your place, though. I don’t know if I could have...."

"It’s all right," she whispered. "Perhaps it is best not to know."

The three of them broke apart. Ronon lent Teyla his hand to help her up into the Jumper, and Rodney waved a warning finger in his face and said in a slightly low tone that he must have thought was somehow private, "We’re not done with this. I’m serious."

"You’re always serious," Ronon said affably. "You’re also shit out of luck. It’s mine now."

"It was a mistake!" Rodney said, his panicky tone difficult to reconcile with Ronon’s peaceable good mood. "We were supposed to be _dead_, we were all a tad emotional, it was clearly a meaningful moment for you– " Ronon’s eyebrows arched, less peaceable now, and Rodney scrambled to correct himself to, "Me! Us! Our meaningful moment, okay? Also, we were exceedingly drunk, so you have to give it back. That’s the rule. It’s like an escape clause."

"I’m not giving it back, McKay," he said.

"You realize it’s not _binding_, right?" Rodney said. "It’s a silly cultural convention, it’s not a contractual obligation. You can’t actually force me to go through with – it – with anything. Jesus, I was _drunk_! What part of ‘drunken, adrenaline-fueled hysteria’ do you not understand?"

Ronon made the helpless face that people often made to indicate that Rodney had driven them past the point of reason and into agreeing with him despite their better judgment. It contrasted oddly with the gentle smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Okay, look," he said, and pulled off a golden ring that Teyla had not noticed on his finger. He flipped it in the air with his thumb, and Rodney had time to make a strangled squawking sound before Ronon caught it and slipped it in his coat pocket. "I won’t wear it until you ask me sober. All right?"

Rodney opened and closed his mouth several times, as if advancing multiple arguments and failing with them even in theory. "Fine," he said grumpily. "But it still belongs to me. I’m just letting you – hold onto it. For the time being."

"Sure," Ronon said. "Makes perfect sense, except for not being at all true. Look, would you just get in? I’m pretty sure we’re going to be having this argument for the next six to eight weeks, so let’s just pace ourselves."

Teyla could hear Rodney grumbling about uneven altitude and threatening not to let Ronon fly anywhere again as he trudged through the sand back toward his own side of the Jumper. Teyla gave Ronon a bland look with raised eyebrow as he stepped in and pulled the door closed behind him. He shrugged and said, "Well, he was never going to leave me alone anyway, and he doesn’t make me all that happy. So it kind of...works out."

"I do not believe you," Teyla said, and Ronon turned away with an embarrassed little grin and began to power up the Jumper as Rodney slammed the door shut on his side.

Rodney turned in his seat and looked behind him at Teyla, watching her as she took in the interior of the Puddlejumper, which was familiar and strange at the same time. "We can come back for your things later. When at least one of us is dressed for the hike. That’s the problem with your particular neck of the forest primeval – terrible parking situation."

"That was one reason I chose it," Teyla reminded him. "There is no rush. I have no strong attachment to any of the things I kept there."

The Puddlejumper banked upward a little too sharply as it lifted, pushing Teyla against the back of her seat. "You’re not– " Rodney said.

"I _know_," Ronon growled.

Teyla reached between their seats and put her hand in Rodney’s, her arm leaning against the arm of his seat. He looked back at her with startled eyes, but relaxed when he saw her smile. "Nervous?" he said.

"Is Ronon so bad a pilot?" she teased.

"Well. No comment. But I meant– "

"I know," she said. "I.... No. I think it will be...good to be home."

Her wrist still ached when she gripped anything too tightly, but she gripped Rodney’s hand with all her strength anyhow, until they were very far out over the sea.


End file.
